Madhya Pradesh: Village performs penance by marrying off widows

Panna (Madhya Pradesh): The blot is too dark to be eradicated. Nearly 16 years after the gory death of 87-year-old Kuttu Bai who was allegedly driven to commit “Sati” by burning her to death in the funeral pyre of her nonagenarian husband, the people of Patna Tamola in Madhya Pradesh’s Panna district under the poverty-stricken Bundelkhand region, are still finding it hard to obliterate the taint, the gruesome incident has earned for the village.

Shaken by the horrific incident and the consequent negative publicity it had attracted at the national and international levels then, the villagers have quietly but determinedly initiated moves to rescue damsels in distress in and around the village by socially rehabilitating them as “atonement” for the tragic end of Kuttu Bai.

“We have taken up community-based welfare measures to rehabilitate the women who turn widow in young age or deserted by their husbands by solemnising their marriage within their respective community,” social activist Ramadin Chourasia told this newspaper.

The villagers identify grooms for widows after soliciting consent of their respective family members and marry them off at the ancient Talari Mata shrine at Tawai, nearly 35 km from their villages.

The village has hosted over two dozen such marriages in the past four years.

The latest beneficiary of the welfare programmes launched by the villagers is 21-year-old Pinki Namdev, a “deserted wife” whose marriage was performed on May 10 with a village youth with the consent of her family members, according to Mr Chourasia.

Besides, the villagers have vowed to fight against social evils by spreading awareness against superstitious practices.

The village took almost half a decade to overcome the shock over the tragic “Sati” of Kuttu Bai on August 6, 2002.

“The horrifying scene of Kuttu Bai running like a woman possessed towards the funeral pyre of her husband amidst frenzied shouting by hundreds of people gathered at the cremation ground still haunts me. Our heads hang in shame when our children remind us of the incident by saying that they could find its mention on Google,” said A. Chourasia, a retired school teacher.

Some people had then endeavoured to glorify the incident by declaring the deceased as “Sati” to exploit religious sentiments of gullible people in the region. They had performed “Parikrama” (circumambulation) of the site of the incident and started spreading rumours that critically sick people could even recover fully by doing so.

The village had then turned into a pilgrimage destination overnight with lakhs people in the region thronging the site to worship the "Sati" for  divine blessing.

The local district administration had then foiled attempts by a section of people to build a “Sati” temple by deploying police at the site round-the-clock for a year.

Later, the state government as well as the Centre had imposed economic sanction on the village by cutting all kinds of aid as punishment for allowing the tragedy to happen.

As many as 17 people in the villages were booked under Commission of Sati(Prevention) Act, 1987, and four of them were later sentenced to life imprisonment by a local court in connection with the incident.

While three of them have completed their jail terms six months ago, the other convict was still serving the sentence. This was the last “Sati” incident recorded officially in India.

A section of people in the village still believed that Kuttu Bai had volunteered to die in funeral pyre of her husband that day because she thought that there would be no one to look after her after his hubby’s death since their two sons were living separately then.

But, there were whisperings still heard in the village that she was provoked by some people to take the deadly and tragic plunge on the pyre.

Curiously, every family in the village has at least one member in the government service serving in different departments, some of whom even as doctors and engineers. The educated new generation has contributed a great deal to help widows in the village  get remarried and supporting women facing hardships.